As wrongdoing will continue to occur in society, the manner in which wrongdoers are dealt with will be debated alongside it. Hence, it is vital to have a justice process that can adequately deal with wrongdoers in a manner that incarceration has not, and in recent times, such an ideology of justice has emerged; restorative justice. This journal will divulge into restorative justice, and to do this, I shall; describe restorative, compare and contrast different types of concepts of justice, exemplify critiques, and benefits of restorative justice, and discuss the future of restorative justice. In the end, restorative justice will be clearly depicted as a tremendous process that has been far too long ignored by conventional justice practices, and in the future should be utilized more, as it has great potential to aid numerous individuals who make mistakes.
To begin with, restorative justice is an attempt to address the several flaws that the criminal justice system possesses in terms of not adequately meeting the needs of each stakeholder: the harmer, the harmed, and the community (Zehr, 2015, pg. 5-6). But what is restorative justice? One of the concerns with restorative justice is that it lacks a clear definition, instead possessing a variety definitions provided by numerous people (Abramson, 2018, Lecture on Defining Restorative Justice). While this can be seen as a limitation of restorative justice, I believe it to be otherwise, as having numerous definitions implies that